Reading Roulette
Stories for Befriending Boredom
This week: This is your mind on wandering
At Human Parts, we spend our days scouring the Medium platform for essays and perspectives we think our audience would love. Along the way, we stumble upon countless stories that surprise us — proof of the internet’s ability to deliver what we didn’t know we needed.
Each week, we’ll share a few of our favorites, along with recommended reading from across Medium, in a roundup we call ‘Reading Roulette.’ If you come across anything we missed, let us know in the responses!
In her book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, Manoush Zomorodi explores the connection between idle minds and big ideas, leading her to conclude that, when it comes to creativity, boredom is actually beneficial to us. The gist is this: When your mind has the time and space to wander, it’ll eventually find itself in unexpected, unconventional, even brilliant places.
In that spirit, this week’s Reading Roulette is an ode to boredom. What do we think about when we’ve run out of things to think about?
To get meta about it, let’s start with the history of boredom itself. The concept is a relatively modern one, Joe Fassler explains in “The Urgent Case for…
